Bill targets repeat violent offenders caught with guns

Tuesday

Apr 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2013 at 10:36 AM

Repeat violent offenders who are caught with a gun would spend a minimum of 11 years in prison under a new bill that aims to target career criminals. Calling the crackdown on gun offenders a "moral imperative," Attorney General Mike DeWine said the proposal is a result of a violent gun-crime task force he created in 2011.

Jim Siegel, The Columbus Dispatch

Repeat violent offenders who are caught with a gun would spend a minimum of 11 years in prison under a new bill that aims to target career criminals.

Calling the crackdown on gun offenders a “moral imperative,” Attorney General Mike DeWine said the proposal is a result of a violent gun-crime task force he created in 2011. That task force commissioned a study finding that 1 percent of Ohio’s adult prison population since 1974 is responsible for 57 percent of the state’s violent felony convictions.

Under the Violent Career Criminal Act, to be introduced this week by Sen. Jim Hughes, R-Columbus, anyone caught with a gun after having two earlier violent felony convictions would serve a mandatory 11-year prison sentence. The bill also doubles the mandatory prison time tacked onto any crime committed with a gun from the current one-to-seven years to two-to-14 years.

Hughes said the bill will target the worst of the worst who prey on society.

Data show that 56 percent of violent felony convictions occur in counties that contain Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Akron. Too often, DeWine said, people shrug off violent crime in Ohio’s inner cities, but “We’re not going to put up with it anymore.”

“The most dangerous place to be is an inner city in this state,” DeWine said. “Those kids have the same right to grow up without facing the obstacles of a violent community. I think it’s a moral imperative that we not put up with this.”

Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said most violent crime in Franklin County involves guns, and targeting violent career criminals will reduce crime. “Our problems are the intersection of guns, gangs and drugs.”

Officials pointed to a 2011 Dispatch series on gun violence that examined the problem of repeat gun offenses in Columbus and statewide. In it, police argued that repeat offenders should face escalating punishment.

In March, O’Brien noted that a team of county prosecutors that specializes in gun crimes had a 98 percent conviction rate over three years on 1,126 cases, but fewer than a third included prison time. The numbers showed the need for tougher punishments on repeat gun offenders, O’Brien said.

Sen. John Eklund, R-Chardon, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, called the bill an intriguing idea.

“There is no question that gun violence is an issue in Ohio and across America,” said Eklund, whose town suffered through a shooting rampage in February 2012 when a student, T.J. Lane, shot and killed three students in the high school cafeteria. He received a life sentence.

“I really believe the most heinous acts we see so often are committed by people who obviously have some sort of mental or social issue that has gone undetected or unaddressed,” Eklund said. “ That’s probably an area of focus we ought to be paying attention to.”

If multiple offenders are particularly prone to gun violence, the legislature should address that as well, he said.

With Ohio’s budget troubles and a prison population at 30 percent over capacity, the recent trend in sentencing has been toward lessening prison time and mandatory sentences, particularly for low-level offenders who can be diverted to alternative sentencing options.

Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, who has worked on sentencing bills for a decade, said it’s good to target the most-serious violent offenders, but he wonders how it will affect past changes to Ohio’s repeat violent-offender and gun-specification laws.

“The question is, what will this new law do additional and how will it be paid for?” he said.

jsiegel@dispatch.com

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